I don't have to live the lives of my characters to write about them. It's about really putting yourself in their shoes.

A thinking man never be a party man.

Friedrich Nietzsche

It was a very cool thing to be a smart girl, as opposed to some other, different kind. And I think that made a great deal of difference to me growing up and in my life afterward.

Elena Kagan

I find something repulsive about the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless sins onto a scapegoat and expect them to pass from me; we rightly sneer at the barbaric societies that practice this unpleasantness in its literal form. There's no moral value in the vicarious gesture anyway. As Thomas Paine pointed out, you may if you wish take on a another man's debt, or even to take his place in prison. That would be self-sacrificing. But you may not assume his actual crimes as if they were your own; for one thing you did not commit them and might have died rather than do so; for another this impossible action would rob him of individual responsibility. So the whole apparatus of absolution and forgiveness strikes me as positively immoral, while the concept of revealed truth degrades the concept of free intelligence by purportedly relieving us of the hard task of working out the ethical principles for ourselves.

Christopher Hitchens

Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.

Benjamin Franklin

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Issac Newt

I'm always on the court with my dad.

Venus Williams

Nobody trips over mountains. It is the small pebble that causes you to stumble. Pass all the pebbles in your path and you will find you have crossed the mountain.

Anon.

Blessed are those who give without remembering. And blessed are those who take without forgetting.

Bernard Meltzer

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

John Ruskin

Awards were made in Hollywood, in whatever the time it was created. They're to promote each other's movies. You give me an award, I give you an award and people will believe that we are great movies and they'll go to see them. It's still the same.

Javier Bardem

I'd never met a woman I considered as intelligent as me. That sounds bigheaded, but every woman I met was either a dolly-chick, or a sort of screwed-up intellectual chick. And of course, in the field I was in, I didn't meet many intellectual people anyway. I always had this dream of meeting an artist, an artist girl who would be like me. And I thought it was a myth, but then I met Yoko and that was it.

John Lennon

People always make war when they say they love peace.

David Herbert Lawrence